


Vegas by Daybreak

by garden of succulents (staranise)



Series: garden of succulents [2]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Dating, Dessa Darling, F/M, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Songfic, Substance Abuse, discussion of self-injury, discussion of suicide, finding other people as crazy as you are
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-10
Updated: 2017-03-10
Packaged: 2018-10-02 06:40:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10211816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/staranise/pseuds/garden%20of%20succulents
Summary: Kent's two months into dating these people when all his secrets crack wide open.Then the things he expects to happen, don't.





	

Kent had known Maida two months when she asked him out to a rap show in Vegas.  She didn’t give him much more information, already had the tickets, and he didn’t research.  It was a seminal moment in their relationship, that concert, source of endless twitting and in-jokes.  “Trigger warning for poetry, Parson,” and, “Of course I don’t trust you! You never warned me about Dessa!”

The evening started off warm and flirty and full of dancing but the other important part to this story is, Kent was more than six months into AA, was working on being sober and clean in conscience if not body and limiting himself to two drinks a night anyway, so when he was enjoying the night and the company and the music the lyrics started slamming into him with full-body force.

Later, he could remember

 _Love is like liquor_  
_It burns when it moves you_  
 _Far as I figure_  
 _There’s nobody fireproof_

dancing with Maida with tears sheeting his face, that desperate-raw-broken patch in him a sucking wound so bad his breath rattled, and he could have named six liquors and four drugs that would let him feel _not this_ , and the only thing he could hold onto was _not_  to take them, and

_The list of things I used to be is longer than the list of things I am  
Ex-lover, ex-friend_

surprisingly, not fucking; desperately lovemaking, seeking purchase in her skin, her forehead reaching down to touch his while she said, “Breathe, just keep breathing.”  Her lacing her fingers with his like a promise that they’d live to see the dawn and holding his head to her shoulder when he cried after he came, cried until he couldn’t see and told her

 _I’ve read my name in lights_  
_I’ve seen my face in papers_  
 _But my civilian life I spent ten good years waiting_  
 _(waiting waiting waiting waiting waiting waiting waiting)_  
 _For you_

about another life, about a boy in Quebec, about a wound that felt like it never healed.  And he kept talking; he talked about his drinking, about AA, how Kit saved him, about his fantasies of disappearing off the face of the earth and watching people search for him. He showed her the careful rows of scars on the inside of his thighs, about how he was already so in love with her and Luis he was terrified and wanted to make them hate him so he never had to see them again, about how he’d drop them both in an instant if Jack ever took him back, and

_I know that love is never free  
it bows your head and bends your knees_

he woke up in the morning with her sleeping in his bed and was _horrified_  because being sober meant he remembered  _every single thing he said_  so he got up, escaped into the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror, his mind so blank with terror he couldn’t even mask it when she woke up, talking to his cat, when she came to the door of the bathroom and leaned against it, matter-of-factly naked, breasts hanging down and makeup smudged, arms folded.

“I can’t believe I told you…” he said, head hanging down so he couldn’t see her in the mirrors.

“Hey,” she said gently, recrossing her arms.  “I hate to tell you, but I already knew you were crazy before you told me last night.”  He stared at her through the mirror then, and she shrugged.  “Kent, I’m psychotic.  I’m _literally_  psychotic.  I see and hear things that aren’t there.  I take the seriously heavy drugs.  No offense, but I’m way crazier than you.”  And she crossed then to put her hands on his shoulders, press up against his back, plant a kiss on his bicep.  “I can handle you.”

He put a hand over hers, hollow-eyed, breathing shakily out.  “I’m not sure I can.”

“Mm,” she said.  “But unless you kill yourself, what choice do you have?  You want me to make coffee?”

He did not want coffee.  He stayed sitting in the shower until she called her other boyfriend and said, “Luis?  I think I broke Kent.”  Ten minutes later she came in and shut off the shower spray, handed Kent a towel and her cellphone.

“I think the basic problem,” Luis said later over lunch, having met them in the city, “is that a fundamental assumption of your universe has been that if anybody actually knew all this shit, they wouldn’t want anything to do with you.”

“Yeah,” Kent said.  “I mean, my AA group knows.  But that’s not the same as _dating._   So now I’m just kind of…”

“Having a failure of imagination,” Maida said, her chin propped on her fist as she stirred through her salad for candied pecans.  Luis gave her a quelling look.

“Writing the rules as you go along,” he said more diplomatically.

“Our fundamental assumption is that you’re _not_  a piece of shit,” Maida said.  “I know it’s a lot to take in.”

Kent stared down at his sandwich.  “You say that like it’s a joke, but…”  He picked the sandwich up, took another bite.

“I joke because I can’t actually handle all the emotions I have if I take it seriously,” she confided, nose wrinkling.  “I hate myself pretty much all the time.”

“Same,” Luis said.  Kent put down his sandwich and stared at both of them.

“But you’re both–you’re _not_  pieces of shit.”

“Right?” Luis asked.  “That’s the disease.  Or diseases.”

“The whole damned pack of lies,” Maida said, sarcastically cheerful.

Kent put his head in his hands.  “This actually is a lot to take in. I so didn’t know I’d be spending my weekend this way.”

“From now on,” Luis said, “we’ll try to schedule soul-wrenching conversations ahead of time to make sure it fits your life.”

He meant it.  And what was more, he actually _did_  it, right after telling Kent that they could reschedule around any appointments he made in the future with the therapist they’d chivvied him into calling.

He had no idea how to explain his summer when people asked him at training camp.  The most he managed was, “Kept busy. Went to a lot of concerts.”


End file.
